Face of Chaos

Monday, we interred a good friend at the Florida National Cemetery.

Whatever else needs saying about the Department of Defense, they create good cemeteries…good gardens of stone. The best, in my experience is the memorial cemetery above Omaha Beach in Normandy, which I visited on a cool foggy and drizzly day because the bus driver of the “In the Footsteps of William the Conqueror” tour I was taking wasn’t about to let a load of history-obsessed American tourists omit that hallowed piece of ground from their itinerary.

But I digress.

I didn’t know Don all my life. In truth, I didn’t really get to know him until after my parents had retired to Florida and, in a rather remarkable cascade of friendship, drawn a good handful of their peers down to the very much “off the grid” town of Tavares. When I came down to visit Mom and Dad, I’d invariably visit Don and his wife, Jean, too. When I moved down here myself in 1997, the five of us tended to get together whenever the occasion–Christmas, Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day, etc. — called for family dinners, because Don and Jean’s three kids were scattered around the country and Jean, as a polio survivor with post-polio syndrome, preferred not to travel.

As Jean’s mobility faded, Don did everything for her. He’d say, whenever the question came up, that his heart’s desire was to live ten minutes longer than Jean. In the end, though, his body betrayed him. He didn’t talk about it much–Marines don’t; and in my experience, once a Marine, always a Marine–but the last few years had withered him. One by one, he was forced to abandon his passions. In the end, he needed my dad’s help to get Jean’s wheelchair out of the car when, on rarer and rarer occasions, we all got together.

I knew he was in virtually constant pain when we gathered for the last time at Christmas, yet he was, as always, cheerful and without complaint.

Marines.

He died at the end of February…with less dignity than he deserved, but that’s a digression I’ll avoid for now. A week later, his children hosted a memorial service, but the interment was deferred until Monday. The reason, as best I understand it, is simply that there’s a hard limit to the number of services the Florida National Cemetery can handle on any given day and you kinda, hafta wait your turn.

Men of military bearing but no obvious service or rank met us at the cemetery entrance and directed our four cars to the “Cortege Assembly Area” where we lined up between two other families (with room, I’d say, for another three in the lanes behind us) to wait for our guide to glide up in a golf cart to lead us to one of at least three committal pavilions.

A four-man honor guard from the Bushnell VFW came to attention as the fourteen of us came down the path to the pavilion. Off hand, I’d say none of them was younger than fifty. ‘Nam vets, I imagine, but the chaplain who conducted the service was a generation older…Don’s age…a World War Two vet.

He didn’t know Don; Don’s eldest son had to hand him a scrap of paper with the family name written on it, but they were hardly strangers. His voice trembled as he read his homily and the third chapter of Ecclesiastes. His tears fell on the folded flag he presented to Jean in her wheelchair.

It wasn’t hard to understand why. I overheard a member of the honor guard say that they had a dozen more committal ceremonies to attend before sunset.

It has been, as I’ve noted already, not a good year for life and health and friends and family; and I probably could be coping better. Among others, the father of a close–and somewhat younger–friend underwent cancer surgery last month. The surgery was successful and he is well on his way to recovery, but in that era between diagnosis and surgery my friend and I had occasion to commiserate.

My friend lost her mother at an early age and the loss, not surprisingly, informs her worldview. While she had faith that her father would recover, she said she also knew, in the deepest recesses of her being, that parents die.

Her words continue to echo in my mind because they are completely contrary to my own, admittedly unconscious and unexamined, worldview. To my mind, there are five Abbey cousins of my generation. Three sons for my father’s brother and his wife; two daughters for my own parents. I have two older living cousins. My younger cousin and my younger sister had both died before I graduated from high school.

For me, the knowledge that children can die is etched pretty deeply in my consciousness; the unconscious corollary is that adults don’t.

When my sister and cousin died, the secondary emotion–after grief, of course–was outrage. It just isn’t right when a baby dies or a teenager.

Don was in constant pain. His physical strength had failed and willpower had carried him as far as it could. I won’t say his death was a blessing, but I can’t say it outraged me, either.

I’m not religious, but it’s hard to argue with Ecclesiastes: to everything there is a season.

The Florida National Cemetery can assemble three corteges at a time…several dozen committals each day…because the veterans of World War Two are dying at a rate of over one thousand a day. Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, all at the rate of over one thousand a day…and in your head, if not your heart, you know that’s an unsustainable rate and you know what it will mean when the gardens of stone grow quiet again.

I went on a quest yesterday for a special sort of Hallmark card, the sort of card that can be found in the narrow area between “Get Well” and “Sympathy.” The labels say “Thinking of You,” which is true enough, though not nearly precise enough. I eliminated about half the choices without opening them. They were cautiously optimistic or hopeful; not at all what I needed. No, what I needed was the card that whispers I’ll remember. I won’t forget and Goodbye.

I’m losing another member of that community I call “my adults.” They’re the people of my parents’ generation, the people I’ve known, in most cases, since I was a child. Never mind that I’m now undeniably older than my grandparents are in my earliest memories, my most interior self remains firmly convinced that “my adults” are in their thirties, maybe their forties, certainly not a day over fifty. They’ve been the constants of my life, the circled wagons between me and the great, possibly dangerous unknown.

And now I’m losing them. 2007 has not been a good year. Already there’ve been deaths, strokes, cancer, the ravages of dementia, and a suicide…and it’s only April. I tell myself that I’ve been so very fortunate to have had “my adults” for so long, especially my parents.

I pretty much left home when I turned eighteen and never imagined that we’d wind up in neighboring towns here in Florida, but that’ s what happened and I wouldn’t trade the last nine years for anything. Now, though, they’re both in their eighties. My mom is betrayed and besieged by kidney disease which she fights every hour of every day and my dad is often very still, very quiet.

In the attic of my mind, where I store the bits and pieces of wisdom with which I try to make sense of the universe, there is an image of life as a grand parade marching along time’s arrow. I joined the parade when I was born; I’ll fall by the wayside when I die. In the meantime, I march, crowded about by my peers, my adults, and–at greater distances–the rest of living humanity. From time to time, a fellow marcher has vanished, but I hadn’t really noticed that the crowd was thinning until recently.

There are fewer and fewer marchers in front of me and I’ve begun to feel the cold wind of mortality on my own face. I worry who will be next and when I’ll come to my own lonely exit. And I realize that I’ve come to the place in life where I no longer want all the answers.

I found my card: an understated slice of folded cardboard in warm, earthy colors, a single lotus floating in a bowl, and a couple non-poetic lines that stopped just short of Goodbye.

Hallmark really does have a card for every occasion